Edmund Phelps Sobre Expectativas Racionais

Phelps: You’re right that people are grossly uninformed, which is a far cry from what the rational expectations models suppose. Why are they misinformed? I think they don’t pay much attention to the vast information out there because they wouldn’t know what to do what to do with it if they had it. The fundamental fallacy on which rational expectations models are based is that everyone knows how to process the information they receive according to the one and only right theory of the world. The problem is that we don't have a "right" model that could be certified as such by the National Academy of Sciences. And as long as we operate in a modern economy, there can never be such a model.
Q: Do you get a lot of push-back from the economics profession on your views?
Phelps: I am far from being the only economist who has critiqued the premise of rational expectations. I’m just the main victim, since that approach drove people away from my approach -– from my emphasis that expectations are a driver of what happens in modern economies. Several economists saw that the emperor has no clothes. Oskar Morgenstern explained that rational expectations would be untenable in the modern world, and Friedrich Hayek got the point.